[COM] South Road Superway | $842m | 3km

[fasterthanlids]

Freeways are not a 21st Century solution. We need to focus on bringing Adelaide up to speed and plan it's future so it is a more sustainable metropolis without the freeways dissecting into our communities.

What would you therefore suggest for South Road ?

Bus lane...

[drsmith]

With some larger seats on the bus and legs on the freight it could just walk on and walk off.

[Hippodamus]

Freeways are not a 21st Century solution. We need to focus on bringing Adelaide up to speed and plan it's future so it is a more sustainable metropolis without the freeways dissecting into our communities.

What would you therefore suggest for South Road ?

Bus lane...

South Road is the busiest north / south main road in metropolitan Adelaide. Its nature is somewhat different to other major roads, as it carrys a very high percentage of trucks, service vehicles and freight. In addition, hundreds if not thousands of one car commuters choose to use it on a daily basis adding to the congestion.

the purpose of its expansion or widening, i believe was mainly to do with improving efficiency and flow of traffic, which will inevitably become more congested as time progresses.

although i like the idea of a bus lane, i'm not sure how effective it will be (transit still pulsates from city to suburbs direction in Adelaide - look at Greenhill Road and how few public buses if not any are provided there).

so Dr. Smith, to answer your question and in my opinion, I would add an express lane for car poolers and emergency vehicles only, while lone car vehicles and trucks would need to take the normal or 'everyone uses it' lane. This method has been proved effective in many parts of North America and even Europe. it's a great way of getting people to car pool and discouraging lone person cars which contribute to the traffic problems in Adelaide not to mention worsen the air quality in our suburbs.

[Prince George]

[T]he theory is that once a freeway is built, it's maximum carrying capacity will reach it's threshold as more people use learn about it and start to use it. Eventually, one day the new freeway becomes congested again.
...
I would suggest looking at proactive and pro urbanism cities such as Vancouver (Cananda) and Portland, Oregon (US) which although are western and similar to Australian cities; have turned their backs on freeways, rather; introducing more skinnier streets dispersed across their urban inner areas, with an emphasis on street life, walking, cycling and public transportation usage. Freeways are banned in their inner city and metropolitan areas!

An excellent modern book to put alongside Jacobs is Suburban Nation - the rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream, which devotes a chapter to transportation and several pages there to the phenomenon of "induced traffic". Basically, there are people who are deciding not to take certain trips in their car because the inconvenience will not be worth it. But when the capacity of the roads is increased, that lowers the threshold that is deterring them and so these extra drivers appear on the road and congestion rises again. This is different to the increase in traffic because of population growth - that growth happens at a low rate, the induced traffic effect is sudden. So rather than preparing your roads for the future demand, that demand arrives next year and you have no excess capacity for the future.

Freeways don't scale easily, if you need to double its capacity you need to double its width (or go two level, but the less said about that the better). A rail system can increase its capacity in other ways long before you need to think about increasing the number of tracks.

They also point to a couple of other interesting side-effects when it happens in reverse - when the freeways have been removed, many of the people that formerly travelled on them simply stopped driving rather than moving their driving to alternative roads. They give examples like the West Side Highway in NYC that collapsed in '73 (NYDOT showed that 93% of the trips did not reappear elsewhere) and the Embarcadero Expressway in San Francisco which fell during the earthquake in '89. Pop open a map of SF and take a look at where the Embarcadero runs - right along the waterfront. You can see where the current freeway ends just south of it, removing the rest of the expressway didn't lead to the end of civilization for them.

[monotonehell]

... the Embarcadero Expressway in San Francisco which fell during the earthquake in '89. Pop open a map of SF and take a look at where the Embarcadero runs - right along the waterfront. You can see where the current freeway ends just south of it, removing the rest of the expressway didn't lead to the end of civilization for them.

To be fair - it didn't fall down in the earthquake, just a couple of sections collapsed. They chose to knock the rest down after that and the Embarcadero is much the better for it.

[Prince George]

To be fair - it didn't fall down in the earthquake, just a couple of sections collapsed. They chose to knock the rest down after that and the Embarcadero is much the better for it.

Fair enough, but the point wasn't why the road was removed, it was that once it was removed there was no ensuing traffic/economic disaster for the area.

Well, there was for one person. According to the Wikipedia entry, the demolition was driven by the mayor in the face of stout opposition from the chinatown/downtown areas, and it was one of the issues that led to him losing his re-election bid. Time proved him right - in 2006 they built a monument for him.

[AG]

I think you guys are a little muddled. The Embarcadero wasn't damaged in the Loma Prieta quake. It was the Cypress Viaduct in Oakland that collapsed. They did tear down the Embarcadero a few years ago replacing it with an avenue and the areas around where the motorway was torn down are undergoing renewal.

[sacred_june]

Just had a look at a map of San Fran - and i thought Adelaide was Grid Shaped!

[drwaddles]

The Embarcadero wasn't damaged in the Loma Prieta quake.

Wikipedia suggests otherwise, although it does say that the Earthquake was not the reason it was demolished.

[Omicron]

I think you guys are a little muddled. The Embarcadero wasn't damaged in the Loma Prieta quake. It was the Cypress Viaduct in Oakland that collapsed. They did tear down the Embarcadero a few years ago replacing it with an avenue and the areas around where the motorway was torn down are undergoing renewal.

My understanding was that the Embarcadero did not collapse but was deemed structurally unsound and hence never re-opened (see below). The general consensus of the population was to fix the viaduct, but because the Board of Supervisors had been attempting to have the Embarcadero torn down for several years prior they pushed ahead with their plans to demolish rather than repair. As HRH Prince George points out, the Mayor was soundly defeated in elections of the time as supporters of the Freeway's reconstruction work deserted him, but by this time demoltion had already commenced.

Muni Metro Turnaround: Patrick Lau inspected the Embarcadero Freeway on October 19 [1989] and noted that the freeway section along the Embarcadero Water Front had suffered severe structural damage.

The concrete columns piers at the location of the future Muni Metro Turnaround have failed in the diagonal shear mode. One pier foundation settled as much as 6 inches, and moved sideways as much as 2 inches. Concrete has been spalled out from the face of column beam joints. This is a failure phenomenon second in severity only to structural collapse. Patrick Lau concluded that the freeway is unsafe.

http://www.sfmuseum.net/quake/muni6.html

It's true, though, that the Embarcadero was an incomplete section of a planned route that was intended to head further along the coast, turn west, bypass Fisherman's Wharf, and join up with the Golden Gate Bridge. When construction was halted in the late '60s, the Embarcadero was nothing more than a stub poking out from the Bay Bridge approach that merely dumped cars right in the middle of town, so I doubt traffic levels ever approached anything like what was expected in its full form, nor was its route particularly effective in relieving any sort of congestion. In other words, the Embarcadero's removal didn't cause particularly dramatic economic or traffic chaos because it simply wasn't much of a freeway to begin with.

Try removing the Warringah Freeway in Sydney - now there's chaos for you.

[drsmith]

so Dr. Smith, to answer your question and in my opinion, I would add an express lane for car poolers and emergency vehicles only, while lone car vehicles and trucks would need to take the normal or 'everyone uses it' lane. This method has been proved effective in many parts of North America and even Europe. it's a great way of getting people to car pool and discouraging lone person cars which contribute to the traffic problems in Adelaide not to mention worsen the air quality in our suburbs.

Specific purpose lanes may be useful where you have a large number of commuters going to the same destination (CBD) but for cross suburban routes where there is a much greater geographic range of journey destinations, car pool lanes would be an underutilised resource.

[Prince George]

It's true, though, that the Embarcadero was an incomplete section of a planned route that was intended to head further along the coast, turn west, bypass Fisherman's Wharf, and join up with the Golden Gate Bridge. When construction was halted in the late '60s, the Embarcadero was nothing more than a stub poking out from the Bay Bridge approach that merely dumped cars right in the middle of town, so I doubt traffic levels ever approached anything like what was expected in its full form, nor was its route particularly effective in relieving any sort of congestion. In other words, the Embarcadero's removal didn't cause particularly dramatic economic or traffic chaos because it simply wasn't much of a freeway to begin with.

The Wikipedia article says that prior to its demolition the Embarcadero was carrying 70,000 vehicles daily, and the ramps at Main and Beale streets (likewise removed) carried a further 40,000. 110,000 vehicles is a huge number -- even if these were all just ramps, those cars would presumably have had to get off somewhere else (and having gotten lost there once I can tell you that there really aren't that many options) and choke the traffic there. But that didn't happen.

[drwaddles]

Specific purpose lanes may be useful where you have a large number of commuters going to the same destination (CBD) but for cross suburban routes where there is a much greater geographic range of journey destinations, car pool lanes would be an underutilised resource.

I definitely agree here. Car pool lanes are really a nothing solution - realistically there's very few trips that would actually be able to utilise a car pool.

[Paulns]

Turn it into a freeway and be done with it....

[monotonehell]

Turn it into a freeway and be done with it....

Not read much of the above discussion have you?

A freeway would need to serve a small number of distant points, unlike a N-S connector which needs to serve most of the intersections along the way.